Just a quick read but something about it does not ring true. Maybe it is just my distrustful nature. Or my lack of Pali. But I'd like know more about this Bkikkhu Yogananda before reading through the entire interview.

alan wrote:Just a quick read but something about it does not ring true. Maybe it is just my distrustful nature. Or my lack of Pali. But I'd like know more about this Bkikkhu Yogananda before reading through the entire interview.

Yes, I would also.

---The trouble is that you think you have time------Worry is the Interest, paid in advance, on a debt you may never owe------It's not what happens to you in life that is important ~ it's what you do with it ---

Paccaya: 'condition', is something on which something else, the so-called 'conditioned thing', is dependent, and without which the latter cannot be. Many are the ways in which one thing, or one occurrence, may be the condition for some other thing, or occurrence. In the Patthāna, the last book of the Abhidhamma Pitaka comprising 6 large vols. in the Siamese edition, these 24 modes of conditionality are enumerated and explained, and then applied to all conceivable mental and physical phenomena and occurrences, and thus their conditioned nature is demonstrated....

mikenz66 wrote:Such as implying that Ven Nananda has asserted that everything is unreal. I think Ven Nananda's interpretation is a bit more sophisticated than that.

Ven. Ñāṇananda is exposing the "myth of the given" and what he has referred to as the "relentless tyranny of the empirical consciousness" (Concept and Reality in Early Buddhist Thought, p. 32).

From Ven. Ñāṇananda's The Magic of the Mind, p. 63:

It would indeed appear strange to us that in Buddhist psychology even contact and feeling – with which we are so intimate – are treated as ‘designations’ (paññatti). We might feel that this is an intrusion of the ‘designation’ into the jealously guarded recesses of the psyche. Yet this is not the case, for, in the very act of apperception contacts and feelings are reckoned, evaluated, defined, and designated on the basis of one’s latencies (i.e. the aggregates). Thus there is hardly any justification for regarding them as ‘the given’, though we are accustomed to take them for granted. In other words, what we are wont to treat as ‘the given,’ turns out to be ‘synthetic’ and ‘composite’ (saṅkhata).

And from his Concept and Reality In Early Buddhist Thought, p. 87:

The primary significance of the formula of Dependent Arising lies here. Lists of phenomena, both mental and material, are linked together with the term "paccayā" or any of its equivalents, and the fact of their conditionality and non-substantiality is emphasized with the help of analysis and synthesis. Apart from serving the immediate purpose of their specific application, these formulas help us to attune our minds in order to gain paññā. Neither the words in these formulas, nor the formulas as such, are to be regarded as ultimate categories. We have to look not so much at them as through them. We must not miss the wood for the trees by dogmatically clinging to the words in the formulas as being ultimate categories. As concepts, they are merely the modes in which the flux of material and mental life has been arrested and split up in the realm of ideation....

Concept and Reality, pp. 55 - 56:

Concepts – be they material or spiritual, worldly or transcendental – are not worthy of being grasped dogmatically. They are not to be treated as ultimate categories and are to be discarded in the course of the spiritual endeavour.... That the emancipated sage (muni) no longer clings even to such concepts as "nibbāna" or "detachment" (virāga) is clearly indicated in the following verse of the Sutta Nipāta:

"For the Brahmin (the Muni) who has transcended all bounds, there is nothing that is grasped by knowing or by seeing. He is neither attached to attachment nor is he attached to detachment. In this world, he has grasped nothing as the highest." [Sn 795]

An agenda meant to diminish, obscure, and distort. That is just an opinion, and you, Geoff, are much more educated in these matters. I'll rely on your opinion. Do you think it is real, and worth reading? If so, I'll give it another try.